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Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Theresa May "HMS Brexit" Stunt

Brexit: imperialist Britain faces existential crisis

The Brexiters’ fantasy of a virile Britain freed from the straitjacket of EU regulations are crashing against harsh reality: Britain’s dependence on the European market compels it to maintain close alignment with the EU. But if it is ceases to be a member of the EU, it will have no seat at the ruling table.

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The U.S. dollar worth (Flickr: TaxCredits.net)

Portrait of the 2009-2019 U.S. expansion

June 2019 marks the 10th anniversary of the current U.S. economic expansion. If it makes it through July it will surpass the 1991-2001 expansion as the longest on record. But while expansions are to be preferred over recessions, there are many reasons to view this record-breaking expansion critically. In fact, the nature of this expansion, […]

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Carbon-Markets_cropped

Carbon markets in a climate-changing capitalism

Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism offers an account of why these earlier expectations were not matched by experience. While the contradictions of market solutions have not gone away, the difference this time is that we are just over a decade away from the IPCC’s 2030 benchmark for 1.5°C. The concentration and centralisation of emissions […]

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Stagnation mage: Ian Sane (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Flickr

Why stagnation?

The U.S. economy has been stuck in stagnation for a decade. The GDP growth rate has been only 2.2% per year since the recovery from the Financial Crisis and Great Recession of 2008-09 began. That is far below the growth rate in past post-recession recoveries since the end of World War II.

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Close up of a dictionary word Unemployment

Traditional measures of unemployment are missing the mark

We’ve heard it countless times in recent media accounts: The economy is at “full employment.” The most recent jobs numbers, out the first week in May, show the official unemployment rate, and applications for unemployment benefits are at a 50-year low. The last time a recovery was able to push the unemployment rate to these […]

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